5min's Ran Harnevo on Syndication for Content Creators ROI

Ran Harnevo, CEO of the big online video syndicator 5min says that without syndication, there is no direct ROI around video for content producers. Producers, big and small, who are creating video just for their own sites, are missing opportunities on the wider web, he says. Harnevo made his comments at the recent Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable at MSNBC offices at 30 Rock in June. Earlier this year, comScore said that 5min was among the top 10 video sites as measured by monthly uniques.

5min's Ran Harnevo on Syndication for Content Creators ROI Ran Harnevo: The first problem that I think we’re trying to fix -- I think we’re trying to fix three problems but you know, we all speak of our online video and the money comes but I think the industry is not big enough and I'm sure advertisers will tell you that again and again and again that if you want to shift TV dollars to the web, you need the industry to be way bigger. And I think that right now when we speak about video, we think about video sites. And we basically neglect the rest of the web which is huge, which is textual and most of the sites out there have the intent. They just don’t have a way to integrate videos into their platforms. I mean Brightcove is a great solution for content producers. They want to put their content on their sites. But what happens if you’re a health site and you have 20 million UNIX and you don’t have content? What are you suppose to do? So, one of the biggest problems that publishers experience today in our eyes is that they have a very complex path. They need to take in order to get videos on their site. They need to license the content to get the CMS, to integrate with the net server. And probably at the end of the day, they would go to the video ad networks that would help them monetize because they wouldn’t be big enough. The even bigger problem that I think we don’t speak enough about is that content producers have—to produce videos on the web. I mean I’m sure and then if your business model was peripherals from your video views, you wouldn’t have scale within Beet.TV only. I mean you’re using the video as a platform to leverage other stuff but when people are just producing for the sake of production and they expect the money to come to the table, everyone needs their lunch before they get their dollars. So, there’s no R-Y. There is no really R-Y for scalable video production, unless, your content forms the video production like the main media is doing and you’re producing videos in $50.00. And if you’re producing videos in $50.00 then that becomes the customer remodel on the web, then the implication on the content quality would be severe. What we say basically in 5min Media is that we are in the business of taking the content and putting it on the right pages on the web. So, we have our own video player. We license more than 200,000 videos. By the way, not all of them were produced only for the web. We have Scripps, Hachette, Comcast, a lot of publishers that are looking for audiences on the web and are not big enough as publishers. We basically go to all of the textual sides out there which is 95% of the web and we’re building their video strategy by semantically syndicating the right video to the right page and scale, meaning that if we take this show, this show is going to be live on Beet.TV. What happens if a blogger somewhere writes about this show? He needs to go to Beet.TV and embed the video in his site probably not scalable. But if we take this show and we start syndicated within our network and we match it contextually to all the discussions about video online, the show would get the right eyeballs that the show needs. And if you stretch it and you look them on health videos, food videos, celebrity gossip, usually the content creators don’t know how to reach the eyeballs that they need. By the way including MSNBC and the big fellows that on the web have big presence but not big enough. We work with Scripps. We take the Food Network’s video. We’re more than double their video viewership. Andy Plesser: How do you understand where those videos should be? Is it sort of on which sites? And then on those sites you provide a player and you split the revenue with the publisher? Correct? Ran Harnevo: I think that what we’re basically creating is kind of a next generation of cable networks. Basically, we build libraries by verticals, so it would be technology. We have CNET. We have IDG. We have tons of people that are building the apps. If it’s video or games, we have IGN which is quit new. We have G4. We take content. We put it in buckets and we take only premium content. We’re not dealing with UGC. We’re not dealing with content that we think is questionable. We’re kind of building this premium programming and we take care of the metadata which is key. I mean if you’ll take YouTube’s API and you’ll read a page and you’ll call YouTube’s API, you wouldn’t get the right videos because of the volume of content and the chaotic metadata that it has. So, we basically call all the content producers and we work with more than a thousand. Next New is a great partner of ours and we tell them bring us the content. We usually would shape the metadata a little bit and then it becomes Google AdSense in a way. It’s Google AdSense for video content. You go to Answers.com, the 13th biggest on the web. These guys have two million articles, 35 million UNIX. We don’t really expect them to produce videos, right? Like they wouldn’t be able to produce a video for every page that they have but all the content creators out there would be really happy to send their content and then the advertisers can buy verticals the way they buy on TV.